THOUGHTFULLY DRIVING THE PORCELAIN BUS

A Column by John S Schroeder

March 8, 2003

"I am free to do whatever I want unless it hurts someone else." How many times have we heard that in our lives? Here’s the catch though – How do you know you are not hurting someone else? This is true in both the personal and societal realms.

In the personal realm, say you live next door to someone whose religious conviction tells him that if they even hear the word "bitch" he will go to hell. Now, suppose you like rap music and supposing you like it loud. One day you are chillin’ with Tupac slappin’ his bitches around – loudly. Your neighbor walks by, hears your stereo and now is condemned to hell. OK, so maybe he really won’t go to hell, but he may spend the rest of his life thinking so, and that can have a radical affect on one’s life. Maybe in an effort to redeem himself from this perceived grievance, he decides to fly a plane into the World Trade Center. Now your insistence on listening to rap music loudly is at least partially responsible for 9-11.

That is not so far fetched as you might think. People’s perceptions and behaviors are not, despite what psychologists might tell you, all that predictable.

Sex between two consenting adults "does not hurt anyone else." Yet, our society suffers from a glut of bastard children, and the need to care and provide for them has radically altered the structure of our society. From daycare to women in the workplace to after school programs, how we live in the USA has been transformed in the last 40 years or so. Promiscuous sex threatens to almost literally wipe out the entire population of large areas of Africa with AIDS. These are changes on the largest of scales wrought by the most personal of decisions.

The first of the Jurassic Park movies, and the book even more so, made the point in terms of something called "chaos theory." The basic premise is that something as small as a butterfly wing flapping in Indonesia can set an air current into motion that eventually turns, through a complicated series of events, into a Pacific typhoon. The math behind the theory works, remarkably well in some systems. The point; however, is that in very complex systems like weather, or ecosystems, or societies. Very small actions can have enormous and essentially unforeseeable consequences.

All this leads me to surmise that many of the seemly arbitrary rules of social behavior are not nearly so arbitrary as we might think. One can either believe that thousands of years of people living in societies demonstrated through trial and error that families were better than single parenting, or believe as I do that God ordained the rules knowing their benefit. Regardless, these large and unforeseeable consequences of personal behavior justify and reinforce many of the mores and ethics of traditional society.

Even today, I think most people will concede, if pressed, that bringing up children in a traditional family is better than single parenting, that heterosexuality is preferable to homosexuality, and other traditional views. However, those same people will be largely unwilling to take any measures to enforce those rules. While in their hearts they know the superiority of the traditional, they lack the perspective, precisely because our societal system is so complex, to understand the consequences when people fail to comply.

Because we are such a wealthy society, we can get away with that. Our wealth allows us to build daycare centers. Our wealth affords us a large percentage of non-productive individuals in our society. There are two problems with this though. The first is that our unimaginable wealth (one trillion really is an unimaginable number, but it is the common currency of economic models) was built on precisely all those traditions and morals and ethics. If we stray too far from them we may no longer be wealthy.

But more important than that, our personal behavior, in this case the failure to enforce good behavior on others for the ‘small’ things is again translating into the larger arena. A significant segment of world society seems to be loathe to enforce good behavior on nations. "After all, what has Saddam done to me?" Well, left unfettered, that nutcase in Iraq will destroy our society far faster than we can with our slow deterioration of morality. He’ll bomb us with something awful and it will all be over.

I am in pain, and have been for some weeks. I fear that I am watching everything I hold dear collapse around me. I have no doubt that President Bush will do the right thing, but I am terrible afraid that in so doing, great and unbridgeable rifts within our society will be exposed. They have been there a long time, but we have managed to ignore them. As they are exposed, I think we will slip into a period like the 60’s, which were in many ways a mini-civil war. The traditionalists succumbed then rather than risk tearing the country apart. That decision is coming home to roost.

What really bothers me is that the great stabilizing force in society, the church, has abdicated its role. Concerned about its own survival it has conformed to the shifts in society rather than stand for what is good. I hope and pray that it has not cut the cord to Jesus completely. If the mainstream denominations do die, this will be why; because they have wandered so far from Jesus that they no longer know where to stand in a situation like this.

I seek comfort from church, and right now I cannot find it. The church seems more lost and adrift than I do. That is a sad state of affairs indeed. All we can do is pray.

With Love,